Allen Ginsberg’s 1979 Naropa lectures on William Blake continue from here
This is Allen’s March 1st class – the tape begins in media res
This follows on from an in-class concert – here
AG: … beginning with Europe, or singing through the end of Songs of Experience? Student(s): Sing!
AG: Alright.
Student: Sing “Europe”?
AG: Sing “Europe”? Well, let’s sing these first.
We finished with “The Tyger”, before. How many were here when we finished the last two hours with “The Tyger”? How many were here when we finished the last two hours with “The Tyger”? Between two and four last time. Shall we run through that real fast for those who were missing?
Students: Yeah.
AG: What the tyger was?
Student: Let’s take the tape and play it at fast speed!
AG: Well, either that or just to sum it up, after checking through all the various dictionaries and books, the forests of the night, on page twenty-four of the Erdman text, in “The Tyger”.
(Allen berates late-coming students – “You guys are always late. I’m always late, but you miss precious eleven minutes!“)
“The forests of the night” were symbolic, as we recall from the text of America, of the old order, remember? The classical order. The forests of aristocracy and kingship and priesthood. So “Tyger Tyger, burning bright/In the forests of the night”, that would be the fire of the revolution, also. Burning in the forests of the old culture. “Shoulder” … let’s see, “hammer”, “chain”, “furnace”, “brain”, “anvil” were related to Urthona, imagination, or Los‘ activities in building and creating new forms as poetic imagination. “The stars threw down their spears/And water’d heaven with their tears”, that was related to Urizen‘s rational universe, the measured stars. I’ve forgotten what else we figured out with that but we got a lot of the words worked out, included “water’d heaven with their tears,” I think was the … does anybody remember how we figured that out? Stars watering heaven?
Student: No.
AG: Well, then I won’t go over it. We got into this big crystal cabinet with the tyger at the end. It’s on tape, if anybody wants to hear it.
Yeah, the war of stars and spears, “the stars threw down their spears” would mean Urizen, or excessively rational intellect, throwing down its thoughts, throwing down its sharpened thoughts. Its aggression. And watering heaven with their tears (is) obviously mercy coming in, or some emotion coming in. The tyger was also related to Luvah, the emotions, was it not?
Student: The heart and East.
AG: Pardon me?
Student: The heart and East.
AG: Yeah. The heart would be the emotions. And the conclusion as everybody, I guess, can remember, is that both tyger and lamb are byproducts of poetic imagination, or projections of the human heart. The tyger’s a projection of the human heart, and that’s why the heart beats at the center of it. “The tygers of wrath” – revolution and emotion – which are “wiser than the horses of instruction”.
The “Pretty Rose Tree” is next, for singing – We were singing along in the house. We might as well do that.
to be continued